The lies we tell ourselves about our future (when we’re having trouble with our past)

A few days ago, I wrote about the time I moved to Texas for grad school and the mess I made of everything while I was there.

I left a couple of details out of that story.

The first is that I didn’t do my homework before I enrolled in grad school and moved to Texas. I was bored at my job and felt like it wasn’t taking me where I wanted to go in life. So, I applied to grad school and made the decision to move to Texas without doing much research or thinking at all.

It’s worse than it sounds. I didn’t even know my graduate program was a three-year full-time graduate program until I was already a month into it!

The other detail I left out of the story is that I dropped out of grad school seven or eight months before I finally left Texas.

That means I spent several months not doing much of anything while I fell into depression and turned to charity and hand-outs just to get by.

Why did I stay that long if I had no reason to stay?

Three words: Sunk cost fallacy.

What is that?

The sunk cost fallacy is when the only reason you keep doing something is that you spent a lot of money on it in the first place.

I took out about $12,000 in loans to pay for my first year in grad school. Even though I knew after a few weeks that I was in the wrong place and the wrong program for me, I could not bear for the money I’d already spent to go to waste. Not to mention the facts that I quit my job back home and moved all the way to Texas!

So, even after I dropped out of grad school, I hung around Abilene, Texas, as if I was going to get back in. I told everyone–including me–that I was going to finish that three-year, full-time program.

Meanwhile, my bank account went into the red, I went on anti-depressants, and my world shrunk down to the size of the apartment where I sat alone day after day.

I was trying to not “waste” the $12,000 I spent on grad school, but I was impoverishing myself and wasting my life in the process.

Sunk cost fallacy.

Like the “Prodigal Son” in the Gospel of Luke 15:11-32, I finally snapped out of it and moved back home when the pain got too painful. Within a few months, my career was back on track and I met my wife.

I would like to point out, however, that I am still paying off that $12,000.

Does that debt make me wish I stayed in Texas and tried to go back to grad school? No. Rather, that debt reminds me not to make the same mistakes again. I would much rather have the life I have now than the one I was on track to have if I tried to stick it out in Texas.

While sunk cost fallacy is an economic idea that has to do with money, it can apply just as well to things that are not hard currency.

For example, when I moved to Texas, I became minister to a struggling little church in a small town outside Abilene. Within a few months, church attendance tripled. Good things were happening. A feeling of excitement, light, and warmth was growing in the church. Relationships formed and quickly grew close. We felt like we were flying.

But then things went wrong. Tragedy struck one of the members. Some families in the church felt their grief as anger bordering on rage. I did not know how to be there for them. Meanwhile, I broke off a relationship with a woman who was friends with a lot of church members.

Almost overnight, the light and warmth seemed to go out of that church.

You should note that the timing of my own darkness and depression lines up with the timing of those events in the church.

Once again, I knew quickly that the church needed something different than what I could give. Since I was already out of grad school, I knew I needed to move on with my life back home.

But I stayed.

Why?

Sunk cost fallacy.

I felt like I already invested so much in that church that I couldn’t walk away (even thought I knew it was the right thing to do for both of us).

It was more than that.

I thought that if I stayed and stuck it out, I could somehow bring back the “old magic” we had at the start. What about the emotional investment all of us made in those early months? What about all those high hopes and plans? What about the memories of the good times?

I knew better, but the sunk cost fallacy kept me at the church long after I knew it was time for me to move on.

How often do we fall for the sunk cost fallacy in our lives?

The pandemic is showing us a lot of things. One of them may be how many illusions (fallacies) we are keeping in our lives because of “sunk costs.”

The distance the pandemic is forcing us to keep between ourselves and some other people may be showing us that those relationships belong in our past, but not in our future.

The space the pandemic is putting between us and some activities and associations may be showing us that those things made sense at another time in our lives, but not now.

The time the pandemic is taking us away from some commitments may be showing us that we needed to give them up even before the pandemic.

The pandemic may be bringing us face to face with the questions: Why am I hanging on? Have a fallen for the sunk cost fallacy? Is it past time to let go and move on?

This is painful. Nobody likes to admit the costly mistakes they made in the past. Nobody likes to call those mistakes a “loss” and move on. Nobody likes to grieve that loss and let it go.

But here we are. The pandemic is forcing us to do what we may not have the courage to do on our own in normal times.

I’m struggling with a few of my own sunk cost fallacies right now. I hope and pray for the guts to cut my losses and the wisdom to know how to move on.

What about you? Is the pandemic showing you your own sunk cost fallacies?

What will you do with them?

Grace and peace.